Tours of Reasin Beall homestead will be held Sunday

Wayne County residents will have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity Sunday to tour one of the county's earliest structures -- the Reasin Beall homestead.

The building was stripped down to its basic structural elements this month as part of what is expected to be a several year restoration aimed at returning it to an 1830s appearance.

The Beall house, located on the campus of the Wayne County Historical Society, 546 E. Bowman St., will be open to the public Sunday from 1-4 p.m. for those wishing to get both a glimpse of what the structure looked like when it was constructed from 1825 to 1826. Guides will be stationed in the now-empty rooms of the society's former primary museum building to explain to visitors what aspects of the rooms are original and what materials were added at a later date, and why.

"Whatever you do, don't wear your good clothes if you want to do the tour," said Raymond Leisy, board member of the society and chairman of the restoration effort, standing amidst the dusty demolition materials of horsehair-bound plaster, lath, brick dust and 175 years worth of accumulated dirt.

To Leisy and his committee, along with a trio of expert hired consultants, has fallen the task of not only how to stabilize the massive structure whose low-fired brickwork is beginning to crumble in some spots, but also to decide what portions of the interior arrangement were constructed when and by whom, as well as which of those aspects need to be removed to return the house to its original appearance.

After the death of Gen. Beall in 1843, the structure was occupied by the Stibbs family, who undertook major remodeling in the 1850s. Later on, when the house became a women's dormitory for The College of Wooster, more remodeling occurred.

Leisy said the day following the public tour the interior of the house will begin to be gutted down to its basic framework.

Over the weekend, a team of experts headed by historic researcher and designer Jean Dunbar of Lexington, Va., combed the Beall House for the clues needed to do a first-rate restoration of the residence of the War of 1812 general. Matthew Mosca, a nationally noted paint analyst from Baltimore probed for evidence of original paint colors and studied dozens of fragments of faded wallpaper gleaned from the various rooms to determine what dated to the time of the Beall family and what was put on later.

Researcher Steve McQuillan of Cleveland, mapped patterns of nailholes in the walls and shadows of now removed elements such as crown moldings, chair rails, mirrors and paintings to help ascertain how the Beall family had lived.

As he patiently scraped away layers of paint in the house -- up to 18 different layers in some places -- Mosca said he was able to deciper the interior appearance of the structure across the decades and decorating trends.

The earliest color on the interior, the researcher said, was Prussian blue, a light sky blue color that was achieved by mixing a deep blue pigment into white lead paint. During the mid-19th century, Mosca discovered, the interior poplar woodwork was grain painted to resemble oak, a popular decorating fashion at the time.

Mosca also noted the original plastering throughout the Beall House lacked a fine finish coat, and therefore it was planned in advance that it would be wallpapered. "You wouldn't pay somebody to put a fine finish on plaster if you were planning to wallpaper over it,'' Mosca said, adding, "People back then didn't spend any money unnecessarily."

In addition, Mosca has removed numerous layers of wallpaper from the various rooms in the house in hopes of isolating the earliest designs so they can be reproduced for the restoration work ahead.

Dunbar, daughter of Wooster resident Wilbur Dunbar and a graduate of Wooster High School, said the most important issue that needs to be resolved with regard to the interior of the house was whether the Greek revival and Egyptian revival style woodwork is original to the structure.

"If so," Dunbar said, "then we have a very modern house for 1825. We have a house that shows a very advanced taste for the period and the location ... that can tell us a lot about how stylish the Ohio frontier actually was."

Dunbar said research on the house indicates that Beall employed an architect to design the residence, which was then the grandest home in the county. She said that on the frontier hiring an architect to design a home equivalent in its fashion to what was being built in the east is almost unheard of.

"He would have been a very forward-thinking designer for his time," said Dunbar, noting that the Greek revival style the Beall house is done in became popular in the early 1820s during the Greek war for indpendence which Americans espoused. The architectural style remained very popular until after the Civil War when Victorian influence took precedence.

While the Wayne County Historical Society has a room-by-room inventory of every single article that was contained in the house at the time Gen. Beall died, she said figuring out which room was the parlor, the office, the bedroom, and etc. is a more challenging matter. Dunbar is asking anyone with knowledge of the house from years ago to contact her at the historical society this week.

Dunbar said she is optimistic that the interior of the house can be accurately recreated to the 1830s period.